July 20, 2012

Well, I hadn't posted about this because I wrongly presupposed EVERYONE knew how to do this. So here it goes, this afternoon, a dear friend of mine saw a youtbe video which I have edited for my presentation in Brasília next week. I added some speech bubbles to a video in which my students say what they have learned from a project I developed last semester, AN IMAGE A WEEK. To make it easier to understand what my students say, I've included some speech bubbles from YOUTUBE.

Camila, kindly asked how to do it and this is the quick tutorial. I used an app called sock puppet to record the dialogue, hosted it in youtube and then edited by adding the speech bubbles.

July 17, 2012

This month in Brazil, we have three big conferences for English Language Teachers: ABCI in São Paulo, Braz-tesol in Rio and CTJ seminar in Brasília. Well, as we are human beings after all, with a family and a husband I love, I had to make my choices : ABCI and CTJ.

The conference had over 1,000 teachers and several guest speakers from various parts of the world : David Nunan, Nicky Hockly, Jim Screvener, Jeremy Harmer, Penny Ur, Herbert Puchta, Paul Seligson and many others.

My presentation "Teacher, the dog ate my Homework." HOMEWORK + WEB 2.0, aimed to reflect a little bit about the homework experience and share a project developed with my students last year where apart from assigning traditional homework (workbook exercises) , students had to carry out 10 tasks using different webtools.

Ana Maria starts by asking participants to talk about their homework assignments when they were studying English.

Most participants claimed that homework was too structured and mechanical.Then she asked what kind of feelings they related with homework. Answers were: boredom, competition, threat.

Next she asks the kind of hw we assign our students. She talked about the advances in teaching tools in the classroom, but what about hw? Has anything changed at all?We still tell our students to do the same exercises we did in the past.

There's a big gap between the kind of activities we do in class and homework.How can we make hw more interesting?

Harris Cooper: the use of HW as a pedagogical tool has had its ups and downs.

Nowadays HW is seen as a possibility for further reading and writing tasks. Some students do their HW minutes before their class.

Technology integration is a process! From user to integration it takes time.

The 3 phases of educational technology 1 tech to present dynamic lessons2 tech for sts to have access to information3 tech for production and the sharing of products developed by sts

Where do you stand?

To reach phases 2 and 3 teachers find some constraints such as one computer for the whole class, syllabus issues.

The project

Apart from assign HW, she alternated with exercises using different tools.

Objective was to provide practice in different skills.

The context involved 3 groups, 35 students who have been studying English for around 2 years.

It's important to point out that these students were economically privileged.

The 10 tasks challengeShe selected the tools according to skills she wanted her students to work with.

Tip: plan and be flexible!She included the project into the evaluation system.

The space to communicate with her students was Edmodo. There were tutorials and examples included on the guides on Edmodo.

Sharing with parentsAna Maria, used a wiki to get parents involved.

Challenge #1 - Voki

Challenge #2 - Write Comics

Challenge #3 - Recordr.tv

Challenge #4 - Stixy

Challenge #5 - Picture description

Challenge #6 - audioboo.fm

Challenge #7 - GoAnimate

Challenge #8 - Livetyping.com

Challenge #9 - Voki

Challenge #10 - Voicethread

Close to the end of the semester, Ana asked her students which kind of HW they prefer. Most of then prefere the webtools.

A very Nice presentation!

I also had the great pleasure to meet online friends I've had contact with for months and some for years and had never had the chance to meet face to face: Roseli Serra, Nicky Hockly, Bruno Andrade and Raquel Oliveira.

What I'm taking home? Well, lots of insights provoked by the different teachers and speakers I had the pleasure to watch. Very simply put, I'm sure my baggage is a lot heavier than when I landed in São Paulo, with lots of insights, ideas and puzzles to solve.

WELCOME!

I'm Ana Maria Menezes. An EFL teacher, teacher developer and online moderator. An enthusiastic blogger and curious researcher. M.A. in Linguistic Studies with special interest in teacher development in online environments.